Rand Water successfully completes tie-in of B11 and B19 pipelines

Rand Water says it has successfully completed the maintenance work of the B11 and B19 pipelines.

Rand Water last week announced its planned shut down of the B11 and B19 pipelines from 15 to 17 November.

“The shutdown forms part of Rand Water’s B19 Pipeline Augmentation Project and is the final leg of this program that will increase the volumes of the B19 pipeline and therefore ensure sustainable supply of water to the consumers,” said Rand Water at the time.

According to Rand Water, the B19 pipeline had limited usage as it was only fully connected to the B5 pipeline before the tie-in, and is now integrated to the B5, B11 and B19 pipelines.

“We undertook an extensive maintenance process where they were tying one of the biggest pipe 2-metre diameter pipe called B19 into B11. It’s an augmentation programme that started way back in 2019,” said Sipho Mosai, Rand Water CEO, in a media briefing on Wednesday.

“We’re happy to give an indication that we not only have been able to lay this pipe successfully but we now have been able to tie it in with the other pipes. The background of it is that with this pipe, we are adding additional water into our system to make sure that we not only have water for the now, but for the future as well.

“This pipeline and augmentation is also assisting us with redundancy in our system in a sense that we’ll be able to do maintenance with great ease. We had to open up B11 which is currently existing, install chambers in it in Vereeniging to be able to give us the flexibility between the two pipes.

“These pipes are quite key and extremely important because they convey impure water to our purification works from where we are able to supply the rest of our areas of operation with drinking water. I’m happy to report today that we have successfully as promised, on brief, budget and time completed these major works.”

Mosai said the tie-in of the pipelines also gave Rand Water an opportunity to do maintenance work on other areas of the system.